Part of review forum on “Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India”.
I am very grateful to the reviewers in this forum—Dorina Bekoe, Justine Davis, and Scott Straus—for their generous engagement with my book. These scholars are all leading experts on electoral violence in Africa, and their comments not only help to situate the book’s core contributions but also shed light on what it could have done better. Collectively, the reviews proffer diverse perspectives about the substantive claims and policy implications of the book’s arguments, and suggest productive avenues for extending its insights in Africa and beyond.
At its core, Playing with Fire theorizes the role of political parties as key protagonists in episodes of violence. While a growing literature has acknowledged the involvement of parties in many different forms of conflict, our understanding of how and when parties become enmeshed in political violence is still developing.
In attending to these concerns, I study ethnic party violence in Kenya and India, two countries where parties have routinely featured as critical players in conflict-generation. Combining this larger cross-regional comparison with subnational comparisons within the two countries, I argue that party instability can exert a crucial conditioning effect on politicians’ decisions to instrumentalize or sponsor violence. Instability matters because it contributes to truncated time horizons, enabling politicians and political party leaders to discount the potential costs of conflict. Empirically, I draw on multi-sited fieldwork across Kenya and India to uncover punishment from voters as an important potential cost of violence. Because ordinary individuals suffer greatly during major bouts of conflict, I argue that stable parties have strong incentives to steer clear of instrumentalizing repeated and/or high-scale violence, so as to avoid sanctioning from voters. By contrast, I hold that unstable parties can gamble with violence in a more indiscriminate manner due to lower risks of being subject to such punishment.
While appreciating the dedicated focus on parties as key players in the production of violent conflict, the reviewers raise important questions about the choice and function of violence via parties. Davis asks about politicians’ decisions to opt for violence over, or in addition to, other strategies such as electoral manipulation, intimidation, and fraud. This question—how and when violence is chosen from a broader menu of options—has been persuasively investigated in Sarah Birch’s recent book. In delineating the scope conditions of Playing with Fire, I posit that my arguments apply to places where accountability institutions are weak, making violence a viable option for elites. Another way to read my claims, then, is that in places where violence is already in the choice set—due to historical, demographic, and/or sociological reasons—leaders affiliated with unstable parties will draw on it more frequently and at a higher scale than their stable party counterparts.
Some of this violence, to be sure, will do electoral work, and could thus be subsumed under the category of election-related conflict. But other modalities could help elites to pursue larger political objectives such as reshaping national or subnational ethnic coalitions or advancing hegemonic cultural projects. In the empirical chapters of the book, I show how elites in both Kenya and India have used party-driven violence to advance these goals.
I also discuss how the logics of party violence can differ in dominant versus competitive party landscapes. In hegemonic party eras in Kenya and India at least, I find that it is difficult to disentangle fears about a potential election loss from concerns about future party survival. Indeed, in the early 1990s and late 1970s, the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and the Indian National Congress (INC) both turned to violence amidst declining levels of party instability and increasing threats from new parties. To the extent that ruling parties in a number of African countries, as Straus notes, but also in India, have been responsible for many severe episodes of conflict, my work thus suggests that looking more closely at the impact of instability on the prospects for maintaining party dominance could help us to explain these elite decisions. Owing to lower risks of voter sanctioning, furthermore, we might expect dominant autocratic parties to use violence more indiscriminately than their democratic, but especially stable democratic, counterparts. While the periods that I study in Kenya and India involve democratic competition, future work could extend our understandings about the interplay between elites, parties, and violence to non-democracies.
Finally, the reviewers raise the question of how we might study parties going forward. Bekoe asks about proxies for party instability that could alert us about the possibility of elites choosing violence. Meanwhile, Straus asks about who actually drives the decision-making about violence within parties. I sought to “go inside” parties by conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with politicians and political party leaders across party organizations in Kenya and India. While these data provide many valuable insights about how party instability can incentivize conflict, granular techniques such as ethnography could help us to go behind party curtains in a deeper way. There are, of course, critical methodological challenges and ethical considerations to conducting organizational ethnographies of violent political actors. But to the extent that such data could be collected, they would certainly bring to light rich details about how decisions about violence are reached, and by whom. These micro-level insights would also productively complement the macro, comparative-historical findings of Playing with Fire, and contribute to a larger research agenda on party violence in years to come.
